Facebook isn’t making a phone, Zynga is making Poker its first Android game

zynga-android-facebook-phoneFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has officially squelched rumors of a ‘Facebook phone.’ Instead, Zuckerberg unveiled his company’s ‘Mobile Platform’, a new ‘single sign-on’ system that allows users to sign up for and/or log onto mobile apps using their Facebook credentials. The boy genius is betting that luring you with the promise of less typing/tapping will have you opting to install the Facebook app on your phone and to keep it constantly running. It’s the old Bill Gates M.O. – who cares who makes the device, so long as they’ve got your software on it?

As Zuckerberg was twirling his mustache and cackling with fiendish glee, Zynga was announcing that its first game to launch on Google’s Android system will be Texas HoldEm Poker. Zynga Poker was also the first game the company launched on Facebook, making it the traditional thin end of the company’s wedge. (Suck it, Farmville!) The GM of Zynga Mobile, Justin Cinicolo, also made the assembled gathering aware that its poker product has 6m players every day (54 times the number of Las Vegas’ daily visitors) and that at any given moment, there are 375k concurrent users, of whom 90k are going ‘all in’ (and 89k immediately regret doing so).